REVIEW: THE WIPERS TIMES

SALISBURY PLAYHOUSE

Following a hugely successful run at Salisbury Playhouse last year, The Wipers Times returns to yet more audience appreciation.

Written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, this is the true astonishing story of a First World War newspaper produced in the muddy mayhem of the Somme Battlefield in 1916.

Created on a rescued and primitive old printing press in embattled Ypres in Belgium, the newspaper was created by soldiers for soldiers, giving the troops something to read, laugh at, and enjoy some hope for their fragile future.

Originally planned as The Salient News – hinting at puns to come – the paper featured jokes, poems, and brave optimism, although criticised by some superior officers as “treasonable!”.

Although probably inspired by the biting satirical 1963 play and 1969 film Oh What A Lovely War, with a nod to RC Sherriff’s magnificent 1929 play Journey’s End, this Wipers Times production nevertheless conveys a sense of war’s ultimate futility.

Despite the worrying proximity of the singing coming from the German trenches, there’s no sense of the endless Flanders rain, cold and cloying mud – indeed the use of a cable-free field telephone looked suspiciously contemporary.

The character from the Temperance Society bleating about the soldiers’ rum rations before they went into bloody battle with a meagre tot, and the hint about female emancipation are thought-provoking touches.

But the final pastiche on Kipling’s wonderful poem If seems limp and pretentious.

Runs until Saturday.

Brendan McCusker